


Grist for the Mill

by crickets



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-09
Updated: 2008-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-02 03:52:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after Born Under a Bad Sign. Jo goes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grist for the Mill

**Author's Note:**

> [Original post.](http://crickets.livejournal.com/120345.html)

Jo Harvelle is a barmaid in Duluth Minnesota. She is behind on her rent and a closet neat-freak. She is a drop-out, a fuck-up, and a stone fox. She is her father's daughter – a hunter, a fighter, all piss and vinegar. She is stubborn, unreasonable, a terrible cook, hell on wheels, and a lousy drunk. She is a very long way from home, and she is not easily fooled.

Jo Harvelle is a lot of things, but by no turn of screw, no fracture of light, is she ever a victim. Until one day she _is_.

From there, things go south. If she's honest, things were going that way long before that demon showed up in Sam's clothing. Only, she couldn't admit it just then.



She shows up one afternoon on her mama's doorstep with a duffel full of regret and the intent to stay this time.

Ash doesn't chide her or laugh at the little girl lost. Instead, he tosses her bags into the hall and pats the bar stool next to him. "Looks like you could use a drink," he says.

"Ash, what're you doing on your ass? It's two o'clock and that freezer needs fixing!" Ellen bursts through the front door of the Roadhouse, her arms full, and doesn't notice it's Jo he's sitting next to. She barrels into the kitchen, rids herself of the parcels, and comes back out again. "Did you hear me?"

"I heard you Ellen, Jesus," Ash snaps and hops off his stool. "Duty calls," he says to Jo, apologetically. "Rain check?"

"Hey mama," she says sheepishly when Ellen finally settles her eyes long enough.

Ellen starts for a second before she rights herself again and shoves a bottle of Windex into Jo's general direction. "Clean those windows would you? Got a big crowd coming in tonight. I want this place ship-shape."



The two weeks that follow are, simply put, hell for Jo. Ellen doesn't talk to her unless she's telling her to do something or telling her she's doing something wrong. But Jo takes it. She takes it all with a smile on her face because in a way she knows she deserves it, running off like that, not calling, not writing. Her mama never deserved any of that.

She’s under the truck out back, hands and hair covered in oil, looking at god knows what components and wishing Ash hadn’t gone into town that day, not that she’d ask him for help if he hadn’t, when she sees her mother’s boots stalking towards her.

“Jo.”

“Ma?” She waits. It’s the first time she’s addressed her, first time she’s said anything that wasn’t a command or a direct order.

“I’m ready to talk now and I want you to listen. And maybe you ought to just stay under that truck because I don’t know if I can do this while you’re looking at me.” She pauses. Jo lays her tools by her side, her silence the answer.

“I know you miss your Daddy,” Ellen finally says. “Which is funny to me because I don’t think you ever really knew the man.” Jo opens her mouth to protest, but Ellen cuts her off. “And I know you feel otherwise but it’s the damn truth, anyway. You were just a kid. You couldn’t see the world for how it was back then. Honey, growing up, everything’s a fairytale. And your daddy was the hero of your life. And you wanted to be just like him. Even before he…” she pauses. All these years later and it still hurts her to talk about it.

“And I guess I’ve been trying to… stop that. But the thing is, I know I can’t. Cause even if you hadn’t been chasing it, the truth is that you’ve always been just like him. I knew it the day you were born. Two weeks early, upside-down and twisted up in the umbilical chord. Quicker than the docs could figure out what do with you, you were out. Said it was the fastest birth on record. Said you liked to have died. But you didn’t. You fooled ‘em all. You were lucky, like your daddy. And stupid, like your daddy. So, the thing is, Joanna, I know I can’t stop you. But you can’t go off like that and not tell me about it. Not ever again. I love you too much. You do that, you might as well just stay good and gone, you hear?”

Jo slides out from the truck, but by then Ellen has already disappeared through the back door. She wants to follow her, tell her about what happened with Sam, tell her she might even be more stupid than she thinks. But she doesn’t. She reaches for the rag on top of the crates by the door, wipes the oil from her hands, but only succeeds in smearing the thick goop around, embedding it further into her skin.

Maybe she’ll never get them clean.



Ash knows something's coming down the pike long before it ever does, and he sends her packing. "I'm gonna need you to head down to Griffith's," he says one night in the kitchen after close, "out by Bell Ranch. Tonight. You know where?"

"I know where," Jo says, "but why?"

"Can't get through," he tells her. "We're working a case together. Phone line's been dead two days now. No e-mails, no nothing."

"What's the job?" Jo asks, trying to sound disinterested, wiping the pristine countertop in front of her.

"If I'd wanted you to know I woulda said," he tells her, and she knows there'll be no arguing with him on that matter.

"Isn't there anybody else?" she asks, turning to face him. Ash's face falls and his jaw sets in disappointment. She flusters."It's just..." she fiddles with the material at the end of her sleeve. "I just got home, Ash. Mama's working me to the bone, swears she'll never trust me again. New Mexico ain't exactly _close_, you know? Why can't you go?"

"I just need you to drive by the place. See what you can see. Anything looks fishy, you get the hell out fast as you can. I'd go, but... I should be here. Can't leave your mama alone."

"_Mama_ can take care of herself, Ash."

"Not with this she can't," he says levelly. "Not alone."

"She wouldn't be _alone_, exactly," she says. "I'd be here."

Ash shakes his head. "I need you to do this for me, Jo. I need you get down there quick as you can, no questions.”

"All right." She nods stiffly, grips his arm and pulls him close, so he'll know she means what she's about to say. "But you owe me."

"Take this," he says, holds out his keys, plastic naked ladies and miniature fuzzy dice slipping cold into her hand.

"The El Camino?"

"The El Camino."

"But, Ash." She pauses, the weight of what he's doing registers, and words fly out of her mouth faster than she can think them. "You love that damn car! Just last week you told me if I ever touched the thing you'd hang me out back with the laundry! You’d marry it if you could!"

"Don't make a big deal, Jo," he sighs.

"Fuck you, _don't make a big deal?_ I want you to tell me right the hell now what exactly is going on."

Ash looks at her. "Trust me, honey. You don't wanna know."

She hugs him then, because Ash is the biggest and worst bullshitter she’s ever met in her life next to Dean Winchester, and there is nothing false in his voice. “Why do I feel like I’m not ever going to see you again?” She asks, presses her forehead to his shoulder.

“Don’t be stupid, Jo,” he says, but this time his voice gives him away. He’s not sure. “Now get going. It’s a long drive.”

Jo nods. “You’ll tell mama?”

“I’ll tell her,” he says. “Promise.”



The road goes by quickly, and when she pulls up in the early evening, Griffith’s is nothing but dust.

Jo swallows hard and gets out of the truck. She remembers Ash’s warning, but she’s sure by the looks of things that whatever’s done this has been and gone. She finds him in the rubble. He stirs, coughing and sputtering and half-dead, scaring the piss out of her.

She kneels over him, a hand over his forehead, hot with fever. He smells like shit and blood and piss. She can’t carry him to the car, a heavy beam across his chest. “Griffith,” she says, “Griffith, I’m going to the truck to get my phone to call for help. You can’t be living out in the middle of nowhere like this with no one to check on you. You just sit tight, okay?”

He grabs her arm with his free hand, pulls her down to his level, whispers, voice raspy. “Ca…c…call Ash,” he says. “Th…they…they’re comin’. The ro…road…hh…house. Ain’t… s…afe no more.”

The call comes too late.



Ash’s funeral is like a dream. And at the end of the day, much as it pains her to think it, Jo’s just glad her mama’s alive and she squeezes her hand when the preacher says his final words.

Ellen starts talking strange, end-of-the-world type stuff. But she still won’t say what happened to Ash or what she got up to with Bobby and those Winchester boys the first days after, while Jo was still on the road. After a while, Jo stops asking.

It’s nearly a year before they decide to re-build, and Jo is just happy to have something to do anymore. Life’s been too quiet, the temptation to go hunting too great. She made a promise to herself the day she watched Griffith Stevens die, and another on the day they buried Ash, and she doesn’t intend to break either of them.

Construction goes up – yellow wood and hammer and nails – hunters from all over stopping by to help. The name Bill Harvelle is still on their hearts and lips, even the guys too young to remember him, and Jo figures it’ll be like that until the day she stops breathing. She’ll always be his daughter, always taken care of because of it. And somehow she’s okay with that. He would have wanted to know that the good he’d done meant something to _someone_.

Jo’s alone in the half-finished Roadhouse, cleaning up for the night, when she hears the roar of a familiar engine in the parking lot.

“Place is looking good, Harvelle,” Dean calls from the open doorway a few minutes later.

Jo smiles. “Not so bad yourself, Winchester.”

They spend the better part of the night on the hood of the Impala, talking about the year. She asks him about Sam, tells him they missed him at Ash’s funeral, says how Bobby’s been coming around a lot, how he seems worried all the time. She tells him how all the guys have been hush-hush about everything, how strange her mother’s been acting, how she thinks somehow the world’s gone a little cock-eyed and that she suspects he’s in the thick of it all.

“Don’t much wanna talk about that stuff right now, Jo,” he says, presses his hands into his pockets.

“Well, what did you come here to talk about, then?” she asks. “We’re not much use to you anymore, with Ash gone now.”

“Tying up some loose ends, is all.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Jo cocks her head at him. “You here to show me what a real man is or something?”

“You’re a real brat, you know that?” He pushes his hand against the side of her head playfully.

She chuckles. “Well, what is it then?”

“Just, I wanted to say, I don’t know, Jo. Maybe I wanted to say I wished things could have been different with us?”

“Well do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Wish things could have been different.”

“Didn’t I just say that?”

“I heard what you said, Dean.” She slides off the hood and walks around to his side of the car, leaning her back to it. “I'm just not sure what you're doing here. You know, it’s been a long time. Lots of things have happened.”

“Tell me about it,” he says.

“Well I _did_, but you _won’t_.”

Dean reaches around her, grabs her wrist and turns her to him. “What if I told you I just came here to make amends?”

"Well I’d say that’s probably the most honest thing you’ve said all night, Dean.”



They hear about Dean a few days after it happens from a hunter down from Montana. It’s opening night at the Roadhouse and Jo breaks down in the back room when she’s finally alone. She’s not just crying for Dean. She’s crying for Ash and her daddy too. She’s crying for Griffith Stevens and every other hunter that ever shuffled off long before his time. And she’s crying for Sam. Maybe most of all, for him.

They try to reach him those next days after, but Bobby tells them he’s no where to be found, tells them he didn’t show up to the service, that he didn’t even take the Impala with him when he left. Jo wonders whether or not Sam ever even existed without his brother. She thinks that maybe it’s right that he seems to disappear right along with Dean. It seems to her that there just isn’t any other way.

She and her mama keep doing what they’ve been doing their whole lives: serving drinks and making a home for the good old boys who’ve never had one as good as Harvelle’s Roadhouse, soldiers in a war that nobody ever really wins, but plenty lose.

Eventually, Ellen stops talking about the end of the world, and eventually they forget about all the things they’re supposed to be sad about. It feels good, just the two of them together. And Jo knows that if the world ever _did_ end, she’d want to be right beside her mama when it happened.

“What are you thinking, baby?” Ellen asks her, one night after close.

“I’m thinking,” Jo smiles and drops her rag into the sink. “I’m thinking it’s good to be home.”


End file.
